As I interact with MMO players across the genre in different games, a common theme has started to develop; either you are an MMO player with EVE experience, or you aren’t. And I don’t mean ‘EVE experience’ in terms of knowing how to fly a ship, or anything like that, but more in “you have seen EVE work in terms of its design, and you have seen other MMOs rise and fall because they fail where EVE succeeds”.

I single out EVE because whether you love Excel Online or hate it, the fact remains it’s the only MMO to not wither away after ten years, and if you are someone looking to actually get invested in a world (rather than tour a vacation spot), that’s important to you. I think it’s also important to note here that EVE today is, at its core, what EVE was in 2003. The game has not morphed into the latest gaming trend; rather it has expended and built off that core, drawing more players in while not alienating those who are already there. The same can’t be said for many (any?) other MMOs.

So with that said, this post from Jester mentions something (social hooks) as a given in terms of retaining players, when in fact it’s a rarity in the genre today. It just highlights my point above; if you ‘get’ EVE, you know the power of social hooks and accept them as fact. If you don’t, you focus on 4th pillars, personal stories, ‘accessibility’, and whatever else, and after 3 months wonder why everyone has wandered off and you are forced to sell hotbars while your doomsday clock ticks away.

To put it another way, at some point, someone is going to actually learn something from EVE, right? The genres prolonged tour of stupidity has to end at some point, yes?

58 Responses to Taking genius for granted

In some areas, EVE is a shining example of doing things the right way. PLEX is a great implementation of RMT. The economy is deep and robust. 0.0 space can be thrilling because it’s treacherous with real consequences.

But it’s also such a huge disappointment. Combat basically consists of shooting at a red reticle because your target isn’t visible even when it’s nearby.

As a persistent and thriving world, EVE is a great example. But as a “game”, I find that it’s terribly boring. EVE isn’t a niche game because it’s sandbox PVP, it’s a niche game because it’s a “thinking” game and not an “action” game.

I dislike this kind of post because it implies that problems that “action” games have can be solved by copying EVE. In some cases, that’s true. In others, it’s not.

EVE, by the very nature of it’s severe consequences, puts limits on a player’s willingness to risk. The more “action” you want to create in your game, the less players need to be adverse to risk.

While I agree in that the combat is what it is (non-twitch, only truly complex/challenging in limited situations), and certainly its not a ‘mainstream’ style, if anything that just further drives the point home about the keys to making an MMO stick with players.

If Excel Online can get 500k subs after ten years, why can’t something more mainstream in certain areas (like fantasy rather than Sci-Fi as a setting, or ‘better’ combat) not even approach it’s success? Things like why the economy works, how the social hooks are used, the never-ending progression; all of these are independent of EVE being a spaceship game, and are core reasons why EVE is successful and most MMOs are not.

There are parts to EVE that work elegantly and should absolutely be borrowed by other games. However, even if you fixed EVE combat, it still wouldn’t be popular as a mainstream game.

The reason is that the severe consequences that make the EVE system work are counter-productive as an incentive to player’s willingness to take the FREQUENT risks that are necessary to sustain a game whose focus is more “action” oriented.

At one end of the spectrum, you have a Halo and instant respawns (little to no consequence). On the other end, you have EVE and negative-sum PVP (severe consequences).

Those are the extremes, but the point is that as you move from are intending for your “game” to have a lot of “action” then the closer you move to EVE on that spectrum, the less likely you are to have players willing to take the risks necessary to experience that action.

500k subs is pretty ‘mainstream’ in the MMO space today. WoW still has millions years later, but after that? When titles like SW:TOR can’t retain 500k after a few short months after release, what’s ‘mainstream’?

“But it’s also such a huge disappointment. Combat basically consists of shooting at a red reticle because your target isn’t visible even when it’s nearby.”

EVE isn’t an action game. Everything in EVE resolves through one second “ticks”. That means any combat action in the game will take one second to activate. For many players this is a plus and is also one of the reasons the average age of players in EVE is older than the norm.

Most of my fellow corp members are well into their 40’s and 50’s and prefer the thinking man’s game of EVE. We also have a number of players with disabilities who simply can not play action games. We have one player who can only play EVE using a mouth stick because of full disability. He is also one of our best PvP players and is a director in our pirate corp.

I think most people seem to get hung up on the fact that players can lose material assets in EVE. Ships are consumables in EVE. But it is this very mechanic that makes EVE interesting and drives the player run economy of EVE. But yeah if none of this appeals to you then you won’t like EVE. But the point of Syncaine’s post is that some of what makes EVE great and long lasting could be injected into other games to make them more interesting and not 3 month games.

One of the things I kind of wish other MMOs would learn from EVE is that combat isn’t really the big thing with MMOs. Nor is ‘difficulty’ that is all about “can you press these buttons in this sequence while dancing in and out of the fire”.

*fixed* Those are the extremes, but the point is that as you move from intending your “game” to have a lot of “action” towards EVE on that spectrum, the less likely you are to have players willing to take the risks necessary to experience that action.

You make it sound like ‘action’ only happens at a glacial place in EVE. As someone who spent a few years doing top end small gang pvp in one of the better pvp corps in the game I can assure you this just isn’t the case. Fights can and are found continually for those who seek them.

If you are trying to link this to ‘gear sinks’ and full-loot or something with risk adversity due to the frequency of potential loss you are completely missing the character of EVE.

The link I’m drawing is the speed of a game, and the frequency at which players put themselves in risky positions, is much lower in EVE by necessity because of the severe consequences. It’s not just that players are more risk adverse, it’s that if people lost ships at a high frequency, the whole system would collapse.

Which is perfectly fine if you are like Spinks and others who enjoy EVE and the ‘world’ aspects of an MMO. My point is that it’s a style and one that works in large part because it DOESN’T have a faster paced combat system.

For me, the combat system is likely the most important aspect of a game. That’s why I find games like Rust, Darkfall, and The Repopulation more compelling than EVE even though they share similar traits.

“The link I’m drawing is the speed of a game, and the frequency at which players put themselves in risky positions, is much lower in EVE by necessity because of the severe consequences.”

You’ve been using this term, “risk”, in multiple comments to this post. You seem to be using it to describe situations that aren’t risky at all; i.e., you want to encourage ‘risk-taking’ by completely removing risk from games. Surely you can see this is nonsensical?

” It’s not just that players are more risk adverse, it’s that if people lost ships at a high frequency, the whole system would collapse.”

People do lose ships at a high frequency. Those people are, most commonly, flying cheaper ships and seeking conflict. There are people who fly expensive ships and seek conflict often–they are either very skilled and don’t lose their ship that often, or they run out of money and start flying cheaper ships. People adjust their behavior to risk. What you are actually advocating is common and riskless conflict; which is fine, but call a spade a spade.

Simply mining or ratting in 0.0 space is risky, no doubt. But people’s aversion to risk in EVE force people to mitigate that risk by running away, piloting crappy ships in PVP, doing it in huge groups, and so on.

You also don’t attempt missions or fight rats that are of higher difficulty unless you know before hand that they are well within your ability to defeat them.

I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but it’s a stylistic thing and one that is not appropriate in a faster paced game. And by that, I mean one where such action is more common and frequent.

“But people’s aversion to risk in EVE force people to mitigate that risk by running away, piloting crappy ships in PVP, doing it in huge groups, and so on.”

This is just wrong.

Don’t misunderstand me – there ARE players in EVE that are extremely risk adverse and exhibit these behaviors as well as others. But classifying the entire community, all the player groups, and EVE game design as influenced with this is completely ridiculous and demonstrates a complete lack of knowledge of the game. The great thing about EVE is that the game design caters to all risk acceptance levels and all play styles. You will find a whole healthy cross section of players with different risk habits in the culture of that game – probably more so than in any other game on the market.

No idea where you are getting this idea from but you are either pulling it straight out of thin air or basing it on a very thin sampling of info from narrow sources.

What is clear beyond any doubt however is that you don’t understand EVE, haven’t had a lot of experience with it, and keep making statements about that game that make absolutely no sense given an understanding of the game.

“If you were forced to fight your way our of Jita every time you visited, you would find it pretty hard to get very far in a game designed like EVE.”

Insta-undocks and station games make it more than possible to do what you need to if someone is locking down Jita, much like with the Goon ‘burn jita’ campaign.

“If players weren’t risk adverse in EVE, then the large trading hubs wouldn’t only be located within the relative safety of high-sec areas.”

They aren’t. There are player nullsec, NPC nullsec, and lowsec tradehubs as well.

“even CCP recognizes that there needs to be measures to help players mitigate risk in order to help the game succeed.”

So you want a game where you can’t mitigate risk so you can’t fight back with skill or knowledge or anything? Huh? I seriously have no idea what you are trying to say, other than a firm understanding that you misinterpret the EVE systems as leading to player risk avoidance that proportionally lowers instances of pvp or loss mechanisms – which is in NO way what actually happens in the game.

Not to pile on but to pile on; I’d also add that if you frequently have ‘epic’ battles in top end gear (DF today), you don’t really have epic fights; just that the average fight happens to feature top end gear (due to game flaws) and it features it often.

There is something to be said about fights mattering, and its hard for them to matter when day in and day out, the stakes are the same and the outcome doesn’t mean much.

Imagine if christmas morning happened every day. How long would it take for a kid to stop waking up with a silly amount of excitement? Yet if you asked said kid how often he would like christmas to happen, he would tell you daily.

This assumes that the only kind of loss that matters is of in-game monetary value. But that’s only part of the reason fights matter and with regards to top-end gear, really only applicable in small scale PVP.

Losing top-end gear doesn’t matter for sieges (nor should it) because the SIEGE is what is important.

Likewise, 10-15 people will also illogically risk a lot to save a boat that costs little more than a single person’s gear bag. Why is that? It’s not because gear is worth little — the boat isn’t worth much either. In fact, you’ll frequently use more than the boat is worth in repair shards and cannons to win a fight.

It does make a difference on the small scale, but I would argue that many people, including myself, like to win/lose based on the merit of their own skill and not the gear they are wearing.

In EVE no one wants to lose a fleet fight, especially not one featuring thousands of players that determines system control (a siege). But even in that scenario, alliances still don’t dump all their officer-fit ships and super-caps into the fight. In DF you do, because ‘top-end’ is a shade more meaningful than ‘normal’ (and for some normal and siege are the same thing, while NO ONE regularly throws around super-caps or officer-fits in EVE, and the gap between the hyper-rich and average in EVE is much greater compared to DF).

So yes, not all fights come down to pure in-game value. But on a larger scale, the scale that keeps people around week to week rather than day to day, that stuff matters.

As a veteran of a dozens of sieges, I can only think of a handful of instances where anyone wore Dragon armor in a siege.

But in any event, that’s not really the point and it’s a good example of why we won’t agree. You couldn’t do what EVE does in a game like DF and make it work.

As I pointed out way back in beta, the problem with ‘top-end gear’ in DF has been and always will be the fact that you can get the stats to wear R70 in 3 to 5 days. Imagine if you could pilot the best PVP ship within days of creating a new character in EVE.

“Imagine if you could pilot the best PVP ship within days of creating a new character in EVE.”

You can.

EVE has enough combat role diversity that you can viably pilot the ‘best’ thing available for certain roles in days. (and be able to fly them near ‘perfectly’ in months with the support skills required – somewhat like getting stats up in df is like)

“Imagine if you could pilot the best PVP ship within days of creating a new character in EVE.”

Little would change. The average pilot couldn’t afford one for a long time, and would also have a tough time acquiring one. Said player would then lose it quickly. The exception to the average can already do so (buy a Titan pilot). The value isn’t in the pilot being able to fly it, the value is in the item itself, and knowing what to do with it.

Due to being shallow, the above can’t be said about anything in DF. It has nothing to do with frequency of PvP.

“The value isn’t in the pilot being able to fly it, the value is in the item itself, and knowing what to do with it.”

Are you really comparing the skill level required to do something in EVE to Darkfall? I could beat a brand new player in R70 gear while I’m naked with nothing more than a dawnblade.

In any event, this isn’t really about DF (which is admittedly flawed for reasons we can and have debated before). The point is that the EVE-way, as good as it is in it’s execution, begins to break down if you increase the frequency of how often people engage in negative-sum activities.

And it does so for no other reason than because you lose it faster than it can be produced. Regardless of all else, the game must be balanced in this regard or it will be fundamentally broken.

“I could beat a brand new player in R70 gear while I’m naked with nothing more than a dawnblade.”

I can and have blown up ‘high-end’ spaceships in nothing other than the lowest tier of small ship.

“The point is that the EVE-way, as good as it is in it’s execution, begins to break down if you increase the frequency of how often people engage in negative-sum activities.”

As in increase neg-sum activities to infinity or something? lol I can tell you people pvp and incur loss in EVE a LOT more and with more relative value than people do with gear bags in DF. (relative value being tough to establish but I think ‘time to grind’ whatever is lost being the best metric I can think of)

“lol I can tell you people pvp and incur loss in EVE a LOT more and with more relative value than people do with gear bags in DF.”

I just checked my corp stats for Dec 2013. We killed 56.69 billion ISK worth of ships and pods and lost 49.61 billion ISK worth of ships/pods. Over 2300 frigates involved although we did lose some expensive ships (BS, dreadnaught, etc.). In real world dollar terms at current PLEX market rates that is $1,795 vs $1,556. But this is small fry compared to what the null sec alliances lose.

“The point is that the EVE-way, as good as it is in it’s execution, begins to break down if you increase the frequency of how often people engage in negative-sum activities.

And it does so for no other reason than because you lose it faster than it can be produced. Regardless of all else, the game must be balanced in this regard or it will be fundamentally broken.”

I don’t know how to say it any more clearly than this… if you can’t understand it, well, I tried.

The reason for my comment is that I am not a proponent of the idea that things are as black and white as Syn likes to portray them. The EVE solution is a well executed solution. But it’s not the ONLY solution or even BEST solution if you change even a few of the variables.

This type of thinking leads to the idiotic “if only they had done what EVE did” posts when such direction would, IMO, result in catastrophic and game-breaking problems.

I am trying hard to relate your comments to your first comment where you said. “EVE, by the very nature of it’s severe consequences, puts limits on a player’s willingness to risk. The more “action” you want to create in your game, the less players need to be adverse to risk.” Which was patently wrong.

So knowing as I do that you aren’t a complete fucking idiot I am trying to figure out what your point is with your understanding of risk vs action. Are you trying to say all games should be Planetside 2 in order to have enough action (for you with your gaming style)? Are you trying to imply EVE doesn’t have action (which is just wrong)? Are you trying to say that sandbox pvp won’t take place if people have to risk stuff to do that pvp?

Your misunderstanding and mischaracterization of the realities of EVE have made whatever you are trying to get at with, “The point is that the EVE-way, as good as it is in it’s execution, begins to break down if…” for me.

For argument’s sake, let’s say that WoW had negative-sum gear loss upon death and you changed nothing else. What do you think would happen?

My prediction would be that most, if not all, content would not be achievable by a large percentage of the population. Those without the skills to kill raid bosses on a first attempt simply wouldn’t complete the content because they couldn’t produce the gear necessary for dungeons tuned to epics.

Introducing such a change simply because EVE has it without radically changing the rest of the design to be much more similar to EVE would result in catastrophic and game-breaking failure.

Now I’m not saying you couldn’t add negative sum to a PVE raiding game (and it would actually be fun), but you would have to make some serious adjustments and either make bosses easier to kill or the gear necessary to kill those bosses easier to obtain.

But you used WoW is an example and there is no risk by your definition in WoW. The only death consequence in that game is I guess the social one of a wipe/time to get back to running your instance? Colour me still confused.

In games which both have risk ie DF and EVE you said, “You couldn’t do what EVE does in a game like DF and make it work.” But you haven’t said WHY yet and you have cleared displayed that you don’t get what EVE does anyhow.

There seems to be an inverse correlation between how good your ‘game’ is and how good your ‘virtual world’ is. Take Vanilla/BC: terrible game full of imbalances and crappy design, great community and world; Cata/MoP: the game design is smooth, the virtual world doesn’t exist and the community is crap. My personal theory is that virtual world players and gamers are separate crowds that don’t mix very well. Virtual world players are nerds, the kind that play(ed) dungeons&dragons and spend hours in the comic-book store, while gamers are twitchy ADHD punks with 30 second attention span and the social skills of a mole-rat. If you make your virtual world too game-y, you’ll attract a lot of gamers. They will find the virtual world (leveling, grinding, grouping, travelling) nothing but nuisance and demand constant nerfs to it so they can instantly get to the fun stuff and they will create horrible communities (MOBAs) – which will then piss off MMO players.

This is why I‘m against dancing, twitchy combat, skillshots in MMOs.
I saw a lot of old time raiders, guild leaders and bloggers (high community-value players) quit when Cata raiding became all dancy and twitchy. I want my MMO slow but complicated, ‘cause I’m getting too old for this arcade sh**.

The problem with EVE is that the game is so bad and the virtual world so good, that it’s more fun to read about it than play it. I just can’t be bothered to do blobwars, timers and all that crap, because I get all my EVE fix from reading blogs and such.

After playing eve for a year I quit because of the crappy underlying game. All the planing, logistics, theory crafting, learning about things and hanging out with corp mates was awesome. Finding a good PvP fight or doing some PvE that lead to a PvP encounter was so hit or miss that I just got tired of it. Most eve PvP was so one sided that it left me bored once I got used to scoring big isk kills.

I notice a lot of new game designers wanting to be “Like EvE, but without the X”. But too often X is what makes the mechanic viable. The classic one is industry without delays or distance effects, but it is precisely those delays and distance effects that make the secondary market viable.

They see a lever, and think the lever is what makes things work without looking carefully at what is attached to *both* ends of it.

What’s unique about EVE is CCP. They are simply better at making and running a virtual world than anyone else, by about a thousand miles.

If they stopped fooling around with stuff like DUST or WoD, and just said “We are making fantasy EVE”, put it on Kickstarter, I don’t doubt it would break records in terms of funding (above and beyond what SC is doing).

I think the insane Viking developer aspect of CCP is underrated. I remember when the first big PLEX loss happened. There was a lot of “CCP is going to have to give that guy a refund” responses, including one from a noted MMO developer.

CCP’s view was, “Welcome to EVE Online!” Not a lot of companies would have held the line on that. It would have been a problem to be fixed not a hardcore aspect of the game.

That is a funny comment though Syn because while I 100% agree with you in the context of today’s CCP during the summer of rage when I and many others quit, :fearless: CCP was rightly being trashed as one of the worst gaming companies out there. AV level bad. They were driving EVE straight into the ground.

They seriously turned it all around in a way that gives me (unfortunately?) infinite hope that AV will someday do the same.

Difference is CCP had one slip up that wasted 6 months or so of their time, that they fully admitted to and have since done a 180, while AV has been AV since what, 2008? I mean yea I’m holding out hope as well (and spending a dumb amount of time on the MVP board trying to convince children that candy isn’t a meal 3 times a day), but if I had to put money down on it? I’m not betting on AV anymore.

I am CCP’s biggest supporter just because they did manage to do such a complete turn around. Really it isn’t fair to paint over how crappy they were though and how much they DID turn around from being pretty complete shit for a lot longer than 6 months. ‘Ambulation’ was a 2006 announcement and I don’t think anyone was gracious enough to call them anything other than shit for at least 2010 until the restructuring in late 2011. 2 years if not a lot more than that?

Makes me sad about your assessment of AV which I trust, but community is half the problem around there imo. I wish they had given a big ‘fuck you, we don’t want you’ to every single vet at the launch of UW – either go away OR accept this game as it is going forward. Probably would be in a better place now overall.

The more I play Eve, and I’ve been playing it a long time, the more I think it only works because of the market and how they setup industry. If I were an MMO designer the sandbox isn’t what I’d be copying. I’d be copying Eve’s economy. I don’t care if I’m building a PVP Cutthroat Paradise or a Themepark Carebear Wonderland.

Epic Loots, gone. Industry and Gathering as first class citizens. Global AHs and shipped to mailbox, gone. Gear breaks, and the goal is to make buying gear in the game roughly equivilent to what repairing gear in current MMOs costs. So you have a constant churn. Gatherers sell main mats to markets, industry buys and turns into gear, players buy gear. “Tech2 Goo” comes from raids, and “Tech3 Goo” comes from PVP. All sold back to the market to be turned into the items you actually want to buy.

If you can get a real economic cycle going, it creates it’s own content later on at the end game.